"Ancient Asteroid Boiled Oceans, Burned the Sky, and ..." Topic
3 Posts
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Tango01 | 10 Apr 2014 10:13 p.m. PST |
Shook Earth for a Half-Hour. "These days we freak out whenever some dinky bollide explodes in the sky over Russia. But scientists have now reconstructed the effects of an enormous 3.26-billion-year-old asteroid impact on Earth that boiled the oceans, turned the sky red hot, and generated a half-hour-long earthquake that shook the planet.Though we have heard about ancient impacts such as the dinosaur-killing asteroid that hit our planet 65 million years ago, the image above really gives a sense of perspective for these events. To have looked up in the sky and seen a space rock that dwarfed any mountain on Earth would have been chilling. The gigantic object was about 30 miles wide, roughly the width of Rhode Island. It struck an area of what is now South Africa, generating a crater that would have stretched halfway across that country. The energy it released boiled the top layer of the ocean and sent tsunamis hundreds of feet high through the remaining waters.Researchers know all this from studying fractures in a rock layer in South Africa known as the Barberton greenstone belt, one of the oldest rock formations on Earth. These fissures were created when the asteroid slammed into the ground at more than 42,000 miles per hour. Tectonic processes have since erased most of the scars left behind by this impact but scientists have found sand-sized spherules in the fractures that condensed from a cloud of vaporized created after the asteroid hit. They have also discovered concentrations of iridium, an element that is relatively rare on Earth but more abundant in asteroids
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Full article here. link Amicalement Armand |
Great War Ace | 11 Apr 2014 8:07 a.m. PST |
Obviously no complex life was on the planet at the time. All of this smacks of natural processes. After everything had "simmered down", then life truly began to form in the stable environment
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John the OFM | 11 Apr 2014 5:49 p.m. PST |
This is what those bastards who stripped Pluto of its "planet" status mean by "clearing its orbit". |
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